More on passing impressions of architects in the general public: did you all see Saturday Night Live's Dating Game spoof this weekend? The total loser contestant - or perhaps winner, depending on your view of the world - was an architect "...looking to 'build' a lasting relationship". Love it.

architects who do have game have an assistant taking pictures of themselves doing architect things. ie looking at a roll of drawings or gazing out over a metropolitan skyline and looking thoughtful. i have started doing this. i give my phone to my cambridge(the real one) educated girlfriend so after the pic is taken I can post it immediately so people can make fun of me.

architects have no game. except for will galloway, who hangs out with the boys on the ceiling of the sistene chapel. maybe he can tweet us updates from the conclave tomorrow?

Yeah, Will has game, as does Donna - both invested in being "way cool" and cryptically and tersely saying the right thing. Loser architect, really? Rent the old movie "Revenge of the Nerds." In the end, one of the popular sorority girls ends up doing it with one of the nerdy fraternity guys ... and she is orbiting. It was in a tent or some dark contraption. All along, she thought she was with one of the guys from the cool fraternity. Was she surprised when the lights went on! "Crazy, Stupid Love" was a movie on the airplane last summer. In reality, Ryan Gosling was the schmuck and Steve Carell had it mostly together and didn't need to be coached. The teacher where Carell's kid went to school dug him. Gosling could only pick up barflies. The movie "Man on a Ledge," OTOH, was excellent.

Me? I'm rooting for a Latin American Pope. Those are the areas where the church can lose more ground in terms of membership.

Man, the Vatican is in a world of hurt right now ... Popes usually die in office; that's sort of the way it's meant to be when you take on that job. Either we'll never know or we might find out a lot. I can tell you that parochial school was NO better than public school. This much I know.

observant, I really enjoyed Crazy Stupid Love, and would say they each had something to teach the other. One needed to learn how to respect others, the other how to respect himself.

Quitting another job today, waiting for the boss to come in so I can rip off the band-aid... I always hate this part. Want to get it over with so I can enjoy the prospect of the opportunities on the horizon.

observant, I really enjoyed Crazy Stupid Love, and would say they each had something to teach the other. One needed to learn how to respect others, the other how to respect himself.

I didn't go that deep with it. I think that Carell's character had become a comfortable "old shoe" and that was it. I think his situation would have been typical of anyone thrust back onto the market inadvertently. In real life, I probably see myself as more like the Carell persona, and the Ryan Gosling types, as cast in that movie, whether in school or elsewhere, have always been transparently superficial, so he irritated me.

Petty high school musical b.s. I like that. Sometimes, there's a lot of truth in jest. It's a birds of a feather thing more than it is cool: "architect who views self as artist" PC packaged liberal likes "architect who views self as artist" PC packaged liberal. I was quite the dickhead yesterday when I used the term "water buffalo" and was castrated for it, as in "shut my laptop in disgust." Please, lady, go talk to college guys or working adults sitting at a happy hour and that kind of crap is the order of the day. In fact, I've heard much worse. And well-adjusted educated working women who are good sports think it's funny, too. But when women go to a bachelorette party and stick dollars in the male dancer's g-string, guys aren't offended. How is this high school musical b.s.? It's reality. Anecdotes and all.

"because everyone else does it" is the lazy excuse. she has a whole wealth of stupid things she's said about architecture - quality control issues in her buildings, etc... and then there's schumacher - easily rip-able. appearance put-downs are for people who are too lazy to come up with anything else.

Appearance put-downs often augment an ugly persona, and are fair game. If there is no ugly persona underneath, appearance put-downs usually don't come into play. That's what I see, from intelligent people and not-so intelligent people.

this is not true. the two things you are relating are unrelated. thanks, and glad i could help.

You misread me. If there is an ugly persona underneath, people will take liberties with commenting on the person's appearance. It's fair game. The augmentation is to call out what is considered physically undesirable, in ADDITION to that person being unlikable. That's what I meant by augmentation. It certainly doesn't imply that nasty personae and nasty appearances always appear together.

except it does the opposite - you diminish your argument (and yourself) once you bring in superficial comments about someone's physical traits. and there you go with "but other people do it" nonsense again. who cares what other people do? How does calling someone a water buffalo help a) "augment" or enhance your argument or b) bring people onto your side? it just makes you sound like a little kid.

if you want to play at the grown-up table you're going to have to get a lot more creative.

Live in Italy for 3 years ... or Spain ... or Greece. They talk like this. I wouldn't call it tacky. They have different sensibilities. They speak in very colorful terms about people, be it positive or negative, and the words "bello/a" and "brutto/a" come to the top of the list.

do they commonly use the word "bufalo d'acqua" to describe people? i dunno, sounds different than "brutto" to me. sort of sounds like your post-rationalizing your behavior.

That's awesome. Did you do a translation or did you know the word? I'm not rationalizing anything. I've known who she is for no more than a week. When I pulled up the photo, that's what went through my mind. I've heard "brutto come una scimmia," which means a male who is "an ugly monkey." People in Europe refer to Berlusconi in all kinds of unflattering terms. @ rationalist, what are we going to do, overhaul the cultural styles of Latin Europe and Latin America, from Bologna to Buenos Aires? Not easily done. In those circles, they will speak like this, and have for centuries. How about if I pick on a man? When I saw Eliot Spitzer after the scandal broke, he got a lot of press for being entitled to that hubris, according to psychologists who weighed in, in the media. I took a lot at his picture and thought "Yep, it's his money and all his real estate, because he looks like a space alien."

Physiognomy is a fascinating subject. Whether you want to admit it or not, you all use it daily - in who you ask for directions, in who you sit next to if you use transit, in whose aisle you pick at the supermarket. It has served me well most of the time, so I'm not knocking it. In everyday terms, it's called a "quick study," but it's based on looks.

@observant. dude i ain't nothing (yet) and i know it. i was being flippant, but i figgered the way you drop insults all over the forum you were game...surely you are self-aware enough to understand this point? no offence intended. well, a little bit, but in a water-cooler way, in which case it doesn't count right?

anyway, i agree TC isn't the place for pissing. send me an angry e-mail directly instead so we can keep the front yard clean ;-)

but i figgered the way you drop insults all over the forum you were game

Funny. I criticized a person's looks upon finding out people cow-tow to her. And then everyone got pissy. And I criticize the same attributes about architects in general that architects themselves and the public alike criticize. I'm not reinventing any wheel here. Check out my comments made on people's portfolios, and THEN tell me how litigious I am.

"in those circles" amongst themselves, they can speak however they want. But when you bring it out of "those circles" and among people who find it offensive (such as here), we get to say that it's offensive. That you don't seem to understand the difference is silly.

"in those circles" amongst themselves, they can speak however they want. But when you bring it out of "those circles" and among people who find it offensive (such as here), we get to say that it's offensive. That you don't seem to understand the difference is silly.

Correct. It's America. The value system is simultaneously pluralistic and Anglo-centric.

So you want to feel superior about the fact that you're being rude? K, glad I visited thread central again... or not. Peace out, let me know when the trolls have cleared.

If someone is looking for an apology, it's not coming. It's not about feeling superior. It's about the scolding, which I don't respond to at my age. I've worked for a few despots in my years, and that's what came to mind. In fact, it was on another thread, and not here. One can't expect to make everyone happy in cyberspace.

Trolls don't make well articulated arguments. They are generally ubiquitously stupid and offensive, with the operative word being ubiquitous.

Can we move on? Even "Crazy Stupid Love" is more interesting than this. Did you folks think Steve Carell was a geek in the beginning? Was his "makeover" successful, or even necessary? Does he go back to his wife - is that implied?

The only way to humble and arrogant architect is for a client to take them to a site where the people have not one but two labs and well there are dog bombs all about. Then let him him step in dog shit.

I haven't tucked in my shirt for years Donna. I don't think my body looks right with stuff tucked in.

In other news, one of the big wigs from the account I've just started working on is coming in to town in two weeks and I'm getting a little anxious. I don't even think they know I'm actually working on the account and I'm in the process of developing my first design for one their projects. I've been enjoying my anonymity these past few weeks. Perhaps I should call in sick.

Donna, why's it got to be a BMW? Why can't it be a volvo, saab, or volkswagen?

And Observant, please, please, please, stop with the italicized quoting. I understand why you are doing it, but one of the things I love about Archinect is that the forum doesn't have the quote section that other forums do. And we can all figure out what, or whom, you are referring to just by reading through the comments.

And I've never seen Crazy, Stupid Love.

And I find that I actually look thinner when I tuck shirts in, but I REFUSE to tuck in a t-shirt. Yuck!

Oops sorry, I have to thank Sarah for reminding me because I forgot to say: congratulations rationalist! Woohoo and onward!

Sarah I thought BMW was the accepted snooty-architecty-car? Not that I would ever drive one.

I just spent three hours doing revisions to the earlier revisions for the final O&M manual for the bus shelter project. What a pain in the ass these things are! No wonder every architect complains about having to do them.

I would think LEED types drive Priuses. "Rainmakers" drive BMWs. A lot of smallish 4 wheel drives, like Hyundai Santa Fes is what I see among mid-level types. I drive a basic newish American car. Those of us driving domestics are few.

flocks of pri-i (plural for prius?) here at our super sustainable campus. sorta ironic,since not actually that sustainable with poor insulation and inoperable windows all over the bloody place, but the thought is there...

i barely made sarah's snooty architect car list: i drive a 7yo VW. and i guess i'm supposed to be a rainmaker? the real rainmaking partner in our office drives the company-owned rav4.

the partner whose name is on the door does *have* a bmw, but his dad was a car collector, a habit he's adopted. so he also has a morgan, two volvo p1800s (the sporty type from the 60s), a lamborghini espada, a kit cobra, a '63 buick skylark, and a '60-something buick invicta. all in the shop at the back of our office.

busy weeks at our office. two big public school projects - one just bid and one going out for bid in a couple of weeks. on the first one we did such a good job of designing with economies in mind and documenting the project clearly and completely that it came in under budget.